Claire Hamner Matturro: Thank you, Cheryl Whitehead, for being willing to share a bit of yourself with Southern Literary Review. First, congratulations on your very fine book, Distant Relations (Loblolly Press 2025), which is an engaging, evocative collection of poetry involving nature, family, farms, and much more. Your poems are exquisitely detailed in such beautiful ways. You clearly are keenly observant, and you capture such small images as the “stallion’s lashes” and “[the tin roof’s curled corners,” “spider webs in the well house” and “a burlap feed sack / snags.” Such perceptively described images make me wonder if you are also an artist or photographer or otherwise engaged in the visual arts—or just naturally so precisely observant.
Cheryl Whitehead: I have drawn and painted since I was a young child. My mother made sure I had the paints and art supplies I needed, and I spent hours in my room making things. In fact, my paintings hang all over the walls of my house now, and I have small oil pastel drawings littering all the tables around the house. I often use those drawings as cards to send to friends around the country.
My grandfather, Eugene Whitehead, taught me how to look at the sky in order to see what the weather was going to do. We were often outside in the garden, or rolling over the pastures on his tractor, and I studied every detail in the natural environment, from the way insects moved through the air, to the way an overturned bucket glittered near a feed trough. I have always been a student of light and what light creates according to the movements of the sun and clouds.
When I lived in Miami, Florida, I worked as a cinematographer with my best friend who is a screenwriter. I was able to photograph what she put into words and make evocative images. One of our short films won a South Florida Cultural Consortium grant and showed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, and the feature film we made showed in the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles, California. All of our films are now in the Black Film Archives at Indiana University.
I love shooting films and taking photographs because those art forms give me a break from having to rely on words. A lot of the poems in the book are the result of driving past objects that turn to symbols and floating images in my head. For example, in my poem, “Unexpected Attraction,” I was driving down Sylvan School Road in Snow Camp, North Carolina, and saw a bucket hanging upside down on a fencepost. For some reason, that bucket stayed in my mind and the line “A five-gallon bucket dangles on a fencepost” became the inspiration for a rather strange evocation of winter.
CHM: Your bio mentions you are also a teacher and a musician. Might you share what kind of music? How do those talents and endeavors relate to your poetry?
Cheryl Whitehead
CW: I play French horn, a notoriously difficult instrument because the overtones are very close making it easy to play wrong notes. Playing horn trained my ear, as did listening to music for hours on end, trying to learn all the repertoire I might encounter in my orchestral and chamber music playing. Also, being a musician teaches discipline. The hours I spent in practice rooms and rehearsals might equal half my lifetime. When I began to study poetry seriously a little bit later in my early adulthood, I studied forms such as sonnets, villanelles, haiku, ballads, etc., and those forms reminded me of the structures of Mozart Horn Concertos, and Beethoven and Brahms symphonies and overtures because of the way ideas were explored through form. There are tremendous parallels between the two art forms. The rhythmic study of music also helped with my poetry because I wrote totally by ear until I learned to write in blank verse and other meters.
My public school teaching opened me up to world music. I taught K-6th grade elementary music in Miami. I learned folk songs from all over the world, and tons of spirituals from the books that were used in the curriculum. Studying world music is akin to reading translations in poetry. I learned that although I might not be a part of a particular culture, or speak the language in a song, that the melody, rhythm, harmony, and soul of the music had the ability to communicate something inscrutable about a culture, or country that seeps into the bloodstream. Teaching music allowed me to travel without leaving and communicate transcendent experiences to my students. I feel like an ethnomusicologist of sorts from having taught music to young kids. I’m also lucky enough these days to teach a Jazz Seminar class between my two Honors English classes at Chatham Early College in Siler City, North Carolina. There is a tremendous amount of cultural cross pollination that happens between different genres of music, and I teach my students to recognize the elements of all types of music. That same sort of cross pollination happens with poetry as well.
CHM: Among your poetic images, you mention a bucket in several poems. And the book is illustrated with a drawing of a bucket on one of the front pages. This made me curious as to whether there is some special meaning behind using a bucket as art as well as a frequent image in the poems?
CW: Frankly, I hadn’t noticed that the bucket had become a kind of leitmotif in Distant Relations, until Andrew Mack, the head of Loblolly Press, mentioned it to me. I spent a great deal of time with my grandfather on his farm, so the bucket was a ubiquitous object and symbol. We fed the pigs by mixing slop in buckets. And much to my chagrin, I carried five- gallon buckets from the pond to the garden to water rows and rows of just-planted tomatoes. The bucket to me is also musical because of the way wind gets caught in the emptiness and echoes like a horn might. The opening in the bucket could be compared to the bell of a brass instrument. Also, the bucket can be percussive if it tips over and the handle hits the metal side or if it rolls into another object. While in the natural world, I listen and look in equal measure, which comes in handy in my writing.
CHM: Another thing about your poems that truly enchanted me is the way you sometimes juxtapose the pleasant with the unpleasant all in a short phrase. For example, in the poem “Departed Passing Through,” there is the “honeysuckle roping poison ivy.” And in “American Sentences,” you write “The past is wood smoke / in a tangle of briars / & muscadines.” In my review, I called this your yen and yang couplings of images. The way you create such potent phrases of contrasts is stunning. So, I want to ask how it is you came to do this and whether you see such opposing images naturally or whether there is some technique you adopt to create them?
CW: The types of juxtapositions you mention are everywhere in the natural world and in human beings. So it’s impossible not to be drawn to those opposites when moving about in a rural atmosphere, such as on a farm, or when getting closer to friends and family. Each of us and the environments we live and work in are full of incredible and, at times, chilling contradictions. In other words, to get to the muscadines, you have to experience briars and blood. My father was an extremely complicated figure during his life, and he still trods sullenly through my mind with his insolence and his heightened emotional sensitivity. Those characteristics in him were inextricably bound, thus the honeysuckle and the poison ivy, or the Apollonian and Dionysian. The sweetness and sensitivity are there, but you’ll pay an awesome price in blood to get to the blooms.
CHM: There is so much talk these days about artificial intelligence, including AI-created art and poetry. Many literary journals now feel compelled to note they will not accept poems which are written by or with the help of AI. What do you think about the idea of AI created poetry? Do you agree AI-assisted poetry should be excluded from literary journals?
CW: I am rather grumpy when it comes to discussing AI because I see my students using it both when they are allowed and not allowed. Speaking of briars and poison ivy, that’s what AI often represents to me. I don’t want to read personality-less responses to questions or ideas in a scholarly paper or a poem. I like the quirks that come in each student’s writing. I would rather come across mistakes that I know the kid made than read some vapid AI-generated response. With that said, some of the teachers at my school have tried to get me to see that AI can be helpful in the right circumstances. Also, I must say that I often use AI to generate visual images to use in class, so I suppose getting frustrated with the students’ use of AI in writing is a bit hypocritical on my part. I do not think that AI-generated poetry should be accepted for publication because the work did not spring from the person’s mind.
Claire Hamner Matturro
CHM: Reading a book of modern poetry usually feels rather intimate to me. It can be a look into the interior life and mind of the poet, and often quite revealing even in ways reading a memoir isn’t. Would you be willing to share which of the poem or poems in the collection you count as being the most revealing about who you are as a person? And why?
CW: I’d say “Departed Passing Through,” “Landscape with Fog,” and “Instructions for Winter” are most revealing because they focus on my tumultuous relationship with my now-deceased father. He was a hard worker and provider, but he was like a brush fire I couldn’t tamp down. He’d burn and destroy, die down, and flare up again and again. All the buckets of water in the world couldn’t quell his discontent, or quench his inability to find a modicum of peace. He had a sullen, explosive disposition, and I’m very tempestuous and protective of my mother, so we came nose to nose several times. I could deal with his foolishness until it affected my mother, but when she suffered, my father and I would come to dangerous impasses.
CHM: Might you tell us a bit about your process. How do you write—long-hand on paper, on a laptop, or otherwise? Do you have a special place or time of day dedicated to writing—or do so when the spirit moves you? Each poem, I would guess, is different, but generally speaking how long does it take you to create a poem? How many revisions on average might you go through before putting the poem out in the world?
CW: Regarding how I write, it depends on what I have available to me at a given time. I’ll scribble ideas on pieces of paper, or sometimes in the notepad on my phone, but mostly, I use my computer so I can keep up with the speed of my thoughts. I write a lot during my planning time at work, and at lunch, and I write when I come home between practicing my horn and exercising. Some of my poems come out almost done and others take a lot of revision. I have learned not to revise the organic elements out of poems, most of the time, but I sometimes have to craft and get rid of images and words the poem doesn’t need. “Landscape with Fog” had to be chiseled down because it was overwritten at first. I worked on it (five or six revisions) until I removed all the superfluous stuff that weighed the poem down. I have ruined many a poem trying to revise too much, so now I am careful not to tinker too much.
CHM: What’s next? Music-wise, teaching-wise, poetry-wise, or in your life?
CW: I am currently working obsessively on a new manuscript. It is more a hybrid work, narrative, with lyrical elements, and poetry mixed with prose. I’d say another six months to a year, and I’ll be done with a complete draft.
I love teaching at Chatham Early College. My students are exceptionally interesting, bright, and well read, and we learn from each other. They save my life with technology every day. And they keep me current with twenty-first century lingo. In return, I teach them not to freak out over every little thing in their complex teenage lives, and not to expect to be perfect.
I still practice my horn nearly every day and often set up my little Bose speaker, so I can play along with the Vienna Philharmonic on Brahms and Mahler symphonies. I did the same thing when I was in middle school, except then I had an album of the Mozart Horn Concertos and I tried to play along with Gunther Hogner and the Vienna Phil. spinning on the turntable. One of the best players in the world taught me how to phrase and breathe through his recordings. I study poetry in the same manner: I read the best poets and study what they do and how.
CHM: Once again, Cheryl Whitehead, thank you for taking your time to share your thoughts and answers with Southern Literary Review.
Cheryl Whitehead is a teacher, musician, and poet from Snow Camp, North Carolina. Her chapbook, So Ghosts Might Stop Composing is available from Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, The Hopkins Review, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. She has been a finalist for the New Letters and Morton Marr Poetry Prizes and the Unicorn Press First Book Award. She won an emerging artist grant from the Astraea Foundation and received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Quest Writers’ Conference and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She currently teaches English at the Chatham Early College in Siler City, NC.
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